Between the Lines

Between the Lines

Age pyramids can
track the demographic history of a nation by showing how new births add to
population (giving the country a wide base of infants and young children), and
aging reduces population over time (narrowing the numbers remaining as age goes
up). Irregularities show the impacts of such events as war, mass terror, and
famine, on people of particular age groups. These pyramids show the demographic
history of Ukraine, as seen from the perspectives of 1989 and 2001.

The toll
of 1914-19: The
earliest major disruption to Ukraine's population (therefore highest on the
pyramid) is among people who were born during World War I, the Revolution of
1917 (when Ukraine claimed its independence), and the Civil War that followed.
Many women postponed having children due to the war, and high infant mortality
and child mortality decimated that age group still further. Their diminished
numbers show up in 1989 as a "dent" in the number of people in their 70s, as
compared with the numbers born a few years earlier or later.

The
famine of 1932-33: Another heavy toll was taken when Soviet authorities
demanded impossible amounts of grain from peasant farmers, and millions of
peasants starved to death. Again, many of the women who survived did not have
children, and many of the children they had did not survive.

Stalin's
atrocity: On the heels of the famine came
the Soviet purge of 1937-38, when several million Ukrainians were murdered by
the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. In the city of Vinnytsia, a mass grave was
later found containing nearly 10,000 bodies (Nikita Khrushchev commented that
Ukraine had been "purged spotless.") People born between the famine and the
purge were between 52 and 57 years old in 1989, and indeed, the graph shows the
numbers of people in this cohort sharply reduced. The gap is deepened by the
fact that by the late 1930s, there were fewer potential mothers to even
consider having children, because by then the women of child-bearing age were
largely the children of the generation that had been previously reduced by the
Revolution and World War I. This "echo" impact is a phenomenon repeated a
generation after each major disruption through the century.

The
trauma of transition: A new fall in
fertility, caused by the deep and protracted social and economic crisis that
has gripped Ukraine in the post-Communist period of transition, results in a
dramatic narrowing of the pyramid's base. Many women are discouraged, and say
they do not want to bring children into a world facing such dismal prospects.
According to projections, the population age structure will lead to a
"mushroom" shape of the age pyramid-an aging of the nation and a rising ratio
of elderly people to working-age people.

A
demographic echo of the diminished World
War II generation of babies shows up in the number of children they, in turn,
produced a couple of decades later. The war babies of the 1940s were so few
that their own children-born in the late 1960s, and reaching their late teens
or early 20s in 1989-were also relatively few.

World
War II: The deepest dent carried through the changing pyramid
of the past half-century is the one left by the devastation of the war's last
years. Relatively few Ukrainian babies were born-or if born, survived
infancy-between 1943 and 1945. Those who survived had reached their mid-50s by
2001, but in vastly fewer numbers than those who had been born a few years
earlier. Thus, there are only about 200,000 women of age 55 in 2001, as
compared with more than 400,000 of age 63.

Female
longevity: In both graphs, women
substantially outnumber men after middle age. The difference reflects both the
greater longevity of women and the toll of war on boys born after the
mid-1920s-the ones who became soldiers and died in large numbers in the 1940s
and were thus missing 56 or more years later in 2001.

As time
passes, demographic anomalies fade into
memory. The scarcity of people who were born in 1916 or 1917 (the 72- or
71-year-olds as of January 1, 1989) largely disappears by the end of the
century, when those who were a few years older and had outnumbered them a
decade earlier have passed into their 90s and largely died off. The gap
disappears, and the demographic action moves down the pyramid to record the
impacts of more recent events-notably, the suddenly shrinking base of the past
decade.